This article is not a report on the proceedings of the National Union of Students conference at the end of last year. It is a personal reflection on what I found there. I went naively to the conference as a fourth-year Arts/Economics student to participate in something that I thought could be the key to bringing the fragmented student body together. I imagined that out of this conference might come a strong coalition of passionate students wanting to fight increased executive control over university courses, increases in HECS, a stagnant Youth Allowance and a myriad of other issues. I imagined energy and debate and strength. I was elected as one of six delegates to the NUS conference in the MSA elections in September 2012, and I was excited to go.
The NUS conference happens annually in December, bringing together delegates from around Australia in one place to discuss the policies that the Union will endorse, and vote for the office bearers who will represent the Union for the coming year. The NUS has a long history of campaigning and action on behalf of Australian university students. Since its inception in the 1930s it has been vital in coordinating students to fight for issues that matter to them. For example, it was involved in the fight for abortion rights in the 1960s, the anti-Vietnam War protests in the 1970s and anti-uranium mining campaigns in the 1980s.
The NUS has also played another role: acting as a breeding ground for Australia’s next political class. University politics has always been in some respects a place where aspiring politicians hone their skills and prepare themselves for entering public life. It is a perfect place to practice public speaking and negotiation, and to develop one’s views about the world.
It is sad, then, that after attending the conference I feel I can only say that the NUS has lost its pertinence as an assembling body for students and this second role has taken precedent. What is left of the ‘Union’ is a society of young politicians vying for a place in the ranks of the Labor party. The conference is not only attended by the Labor-sympathetic (there are also Liberals, Greens, Socialist Alternatives and a smattering of other political persuasions); Labor students hold a majority. This means that in practice, if the two ‘factions’ of Labor students (Labor-right and Labor-left)decide to work together, then all the other participants are made redundant. This is exactly the situation that arose during last year’s conference.
The four day meeting proceeds in a slightly unorthodox manner for a conference: The morning is devoted to private meetings between factions and negotiations aimed at garnering support for office-bearer candidates or certain policy platforms. Sessions devoted to discussing and voting on policy are held from 1:30pm until dinner at 6pm and then again from 7:30 until late. That’s how it’s supposed to run. Part of the reason the formal sessions of the conference did not begin until 1:30pm is that a great number of participants (especially the larger factions), spend their nights drinking and roaming around the La Trobe campus singing semi-political chants. Due to the high proportion of killer hangovers the next morning no breakfast is served and the first meal of the day is lunch at 12. Let me repeat: no breakfast is served at the conference because too many people spend all night drinking and no one ever shows up. At the risk of sounding like a party-pooper, how is a national union supposed to enjoy the respect of other students, let alone the wider community, if one of the main activities of a conference that universities pay over $500 a head for is getting drunk?
Anyway, negotiations in the morning consist of meetings between the ‘negotiators’ delegated by each faction. Negotiators discuss alliances with other factions and then report back to their caucus what has been proposed by the other party. The aim of these informal meetings is to shore up support for the key positions coveted by each faction. For example, Labor-right want their person in the position of President but are not that interested in the Queer office so they are willing to vote our person for Queer if we vote for their President. In three days of negotiations, there was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing between different factions, until finally Labor-right and Labor-left struck a deal to support each other. This meant that the other factions no longer held much of hope of gaining a position, unless graced by the favour of the ruling coalition.
The afternoon and evening sessions of the conference were devoted to policy discussion and voting. This process involved a ‘Mover’, who would present the policy they were proposing; and a ‘Seconder’, who provided extra arguments for accepting the policy. Then the floor was open to people who wished to speak in favour or against the policy. Finally, the policy would be voted upon.
This part of the conference was what I had been most looking forward to: politically involved students all interested in the future of university education and student life in Australia, debating what their union should focus on for the coming year. While there was some fiery debate, I was struck by the lack of good faith with which the whole procedure was conducted. So many personal attacks outweighed respectful and interesting debate, and at times the whole thing descended into a downright shit-fight.
Moreover, it emerged that while many new policies were accepted – a great proportion of them unanimously – no one really took them seriously, as the expectation that they would actually be implemented was very low. In other words, most people voted for most policies because they didn’t care. It probably wouldn’t make a difference anyway. Although I’m sure the leaders of NUS would beg to differ, I am yet to see any evidence of implementation of policy on Monash Clayton campus.
Despite the obvious problems with the NUS conference, I must stress that some of the policies put forward for discussion were genuinely thoughtful and innovative, and addressed the changing and expanding demographic that is the Australian university student. Emphasis was placed on increased costs of living and low government help for students, future challenges facing students and the experiences of students from different cultural backgrounds. After a small coup by a number of factions, Women’s policy was comprehensively discussed too.
Another positive aspect of the conference was that I found many people there who, like me, had come hoping to be involved in something empowering and relevant. The discussions I had with these people, most of whom are involved in campaigns and political projects of their own, were heartening. Most exciting was a meeting held by a large group of women from across a number of different factions, where we rejected the idea of belonging solely to one ‘party’ and made plans to work together in the future, across political lines. That there are many people who reject this traditional (and, I would venture to say, outdated) view of ‘politics’ stopped me from losing hope in student activism entirely.
But I think the meaning of a ‘National Union of Students’ must be thoroughly dissected before (if ever) it can become pertinent again. While a national union was effective and involving in the past, I think it is clear that the current model is not working. Outside a select group of young people who are either a) involved in some ‘young’ version of a major political party or b) involved in other general activist or political activities, the evidence indicates that no one in the student population really gives a damn about the NUS.
The National Union of Students must once again become a true union. It needs to cut ties with the established political parties and become about students, not politics. Of course these two are intimately connected, but real politics is debate about society, not play-acting Canberra’s parliament. We already have too much low-level political point-scoring and slander in national parliament, why do we have to create more of it at uni? A national union of students could be a platform to show that people from all backgrounds and political persuasions can talk to each other and work together for the thing that is most important to all of them: education. No matter where we come from, or where we want to be when we finish university, we all share the same title of ‘student’ for a few years while we make our way to our respective goals. This is an opportunity to create something new and potent.
I don’t have a lot of hope for the current NUS, and perhaps the reality is that the era of national unions has passed. It seems people prefer to join specific campaigns as they arise rather than be involved in student life in a more general way. But I fear that this might end up in 2013 with an Abbott government succeeding in doing even more and more damage to student services and educational independence. Perhaps the gradual disappearance of Arts degrees, rising class sizes or increasingly feeble government help for students will finally make us realise that we need to work together, that these goals span the whole political spectrum.
I believe that some kind of national alliance of students is possible and I also believe there are enough students like me in universities across Australia who think it’s possible. What we need now is to cut the crap of playing politics and actually do something useful.
